Esra Gurakar

Esra Gurakar

Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Okan University, Istanbul

Esra Gurakar is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Okan University, Istanbul. She is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences doing collaborative research with Professor James Robinson.

Esra’s research interests are institutional transformation and political economy of institutions focusing on the Middle East in general and on Turkey and Iran in particular. Her main focus is on formation of different political settlements and the mechanisms of transition from one to another political settlement within which she concentrates on the concepts of judicialization of politics versus politicization of judiciary and institutionalization of rent-creation and rent-distribution.

Esra’s current research is on the political economy of public procurement in Turkey where she analyses the role of public procurement processes on elite circulation in Turkey.

Esra’s work appears in journals such as the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance and the Middle East Development Journal.